Actually I'm quite tempted to pick up a 3DS now that there is a decent-sized library of playable games. I always knew that it would eventually supersede the DS as the de facto handheld platform and kind of a "necessary" platform to own, if that makes sense. At the start of its lifetime, however, I wasn't interested because a) I wanted to wait and see how badly the 3D gimmick would flop [answer: pretty badly] and b) none of the launch titles truly interested me [because they were bad].

Now (or Christmas-ish) may be the right time. Bizarrely not interested in the 2DS despite the fact that I'll likely turn the 3D slider off and then break it permanently in that position. I greatly prefer the clamshell form factor, and I've heard the 2DS' speaker (yes, a single speaker) is terrible.

The 3D "gimmick" (it's not a gimmick) is fantastic. It was never the reason why I bought the 3DS but it definitely amplifies the experience. The disappointing thing about Pokemon is that it doesn't have 3D - just in specific cutscenes and battles, and even then there are FPS drops with 3D on despite the fact that there shouldn't be that many polygons. So I play Pokemon with 3D off.

I could certainly see why some people don't like it or why every single person I show this to immediately says "it fucks up my eyes" (though it certainly doesn't!). But gaming in 3D is one of the best things I've tried, and when I first completed Ocarina of Time 3D and tried to go back to PC, it just didn't work - everything felt so flat.

Kerbal Space Program deserves to be mentioned again. They now added the career mode and saving subassemblies in the editors. Just in time for me. In sandbox mode, I was following the "Go big or go home" philosophy combined with "Why plan if you can take a bit of extra fuel?"... quite frustrating if you can't test your lander and rocket separately. In addition to allowing that now, career mode forced me to start small and keep it small. Currently I have two manned crafts in their final approach to Duna and Ike, only minimally modified from the one from the Mun and Minimus missions (Added an intermediate nuclear stage for interplanetary travel, the possibility to dock back to it, and more science modules). The almost identical unmanned probe already made it back safely, so clearly, Nothing Can Go Wrong*.

*: As long as I lose more Kerbals to bugs than to my own mistakes, I am happy. So far:Landing crew of three was hurled into the NaN starsystem when one of them fell off the ladder while getting out and got wedged badly.One parachute tore off when it fully deployed itself during 4x time warp (perfectly safe at 1x), dropping one Kerbal to his death.Another vehicle with one occupant was sent to NaN country simply by switching control to it.

Three were lost in space when I accidentally undocked the command module early. Could have easily saved them, the decoupled rocket part had a remote control unit and could have picked them up. But I quickloaded in panic, so they count.The first attempt to land one Kerbal on Ike didn't go so well because I trusted the height meter when judging when to initiate the landing brake burn. Turns out Ike has high mountains.Lander test deaths with version 0.21 on Kerbin itself do not count!

Scribblenauts Unlimited had FINALLY been released in Europe for Nintendo consoles, nearly a year after the NA and Steam release. It's my very first Scribblenauts game (3DS version), and oh man, is it awesome! I am so glad I waited, this is going to kill many hours on the bus...

At some point in the distant future, games would be rendered and displayed at 5000 fps. It will be glorious.

See you there. *enters freezing chamber*

Edit: I'm bored, and feel like writing something up. Therefore, my view on things:1. There is a limit to how big a monitor you might want. This limit has been reached.2. There is a limit to how many pixels a monitor of that size can have before any increase becomes meaningless. Many professionals think 4K (QuadHD) is just that.3. Computers and processing power is gradually improving, always.4. So is graphics quality.5. Eventually, processing power would become so powerful that it would be no problem to create fully detailed images in full 4K resolution without any compromises.6. Besides framerate, what do we have left to improve in games with all that processing power?

Therefore this will happen.

Why is this awesome? Because of motion blur, or lack thereof. In real life, if you track a moving object with your eyes, it will appear sharp and the entire background will show motion blur to you. Do the same on a computer screen, and the moving object will appear blurry as well, even if no computed motion blur is applied. Now, in real life, if you're looking at something static (let's call it the background) and an object comes flying past, it will be blurry. In a game with no computed motion blur, it would flash in each position on its track with each frame. If you're paying enough attention, you can see details in it even though you shouldn't. If there is motion blur applied to the object, it would look right when you're not following it with your eyes, but when you are it would be even blurrier.

The best way to solve problems is to go crazy with the numbers. Why can't I find any info on a prototype screen/simulation with non-fake ultra-high frame rates?

NeatNit wrote:At some point in the distant future, games would be rendered and displayed at 5000 fps. It will be glorious.

See you there. *enters freezing chamber*

Edit: I'm bored, and feel like writing something up. Therefore, my view on things:1. There is a limit to how big a monitor you might want. This limit has been reached.2. There is a limit to how many pixels a monitor of that size can have before any increase becomes meaningless. Many professionals think 4K (QuadHD) is just that.3. Computers and processing power is gradually improving, always.4. So is graphics quality.5. Eventually, processing power would become so powerful that it would be no problem to create fully detailed images in full 4K resolution without any compromises.6. Besides framerate, what do we have left to improve in games with all that processing power?

Therefore this will happen.

Why is this awesome? Because of motion blur, or lack thereof.

You say that there is a resolution at which further improvement is meaningless, and, therefore, no one will develop higher resolutions. Why does the same argument not apply to framerates? Anything beyond 60 FPS is already pretty much beyond what the average person can perceive. Double that to allow for 3D glasses (with frames alternating between the left and right eyes, for instance), and double that again just for good measure. Anything beyond 240 FPS is almost certainly meaningless, as well.

You assume that computing power will continue to increase. It may, or it may not. It is hard to say. We have already pretty much run up against the limits of circuit size, and there are theoretical bottlenecks limiting what parallelization can do. Maybe computers will continue to get more and more powerful, but it is not something that I would count on indefinitely.

Even assuming that computers do continue to increase in power, there are many, many things that can be done with all of that power. A good friend of mine wrote code for his masters thesis which simulates turbulent flow. His model was the Navier-Stokes equations, on a relatively low resolution grid (say 100x100 cells). He was using CUDA, a parallel extension to C which takes advantage multi-processor GPUs. His code took about a week to simulate maybe a minute of time, and his results were a couple of orders of magnitude faster than most previously published results. To simulate in real time would require much, much more powerful computers, and every doubling of the resolution for the simulation requires four times as much power (eight times as much if you want to model three dimensions). I imagine that if computing power ever became sufficient to use such models in games, we would see cycles devoted to such applications. So there are definitely things that could eat up any spare cycles. ;)

NeatNit wrote:At some point in the distant future, games would be rendered and displayed at 5000 fps. It will be glorious.

See you there. *enters freezing chamber*

Edit: I'm bored, and feel like writing something up. Therefore, my view on things:1. There is a limit to how big a monitor you might want. This limit has been reached.2. There is a limit to how many pixels a monitor of that size can have before any increase becomes meaningless. Many professionals think 4K (QuadHD) is just that.3. Computers and processing power is gradually improving, always.4. So is graphics quality.5. Eventually, processing power would become so powerful that it would be no problem to create fully detailed images in full 4K resolution without any compromises.6. Besides framerate, what do we have left to improve in games with all that processing power?

Therefore this will happen.

Why is this awesome? Because of motion blur, or lack thereof.

You say that there is a resolution at which further improvement is meaningless, and, therefore, no one will develop higher resolutions. Why does the same argument not apply to framerates? Anything beyond 60 FPS is already pretty much beyond what the average person can perceive. Double that to allow for 3D glasses (with frames alternating between the left and right eyes, for instance), and double that again just for good measure. Anything beyond 240 FPS is almost certainly meaningless, as well.

You assume that computing power will continue to increase. It may, or it may not. It is hard to say. We have already pretty much run up against the limits of circuit size, and there are theoretical bottlenecks limiting what parallelization can do. Maybe computers will continue to get more and more powerful, but it is not something that I would count on indefinitely.

Even assuming that computers do continue to increase in power, there are many, many things that can be done with all of that power. A good friend of mine wrote code for his masters thesis which simulates turbulent flow. His model was the Navier-Stokes equations, on a relatively low resolution grid (say 100x100 cells). He was using CUDA, a parallel extension to C which takes advantage multi-processor GPUs. His code took about a week to simulate maybe a minute of time, and his results were a couple of orders of magnitude faster than most previously published results. To simulate in real time would require much, much more powerful computers, and every doubling of the resolution for the simulation requires four times as much power (eight times as much if you want to model three dimensions). I imagine that if computing power ever became sufficient to use such models in games, we would see cycles devoted to such applications. So there are definitely things that could eat up any spare cycles.

xander

First of all, sorry for the stealth edit but I added a few more lined to the first post explaining why more frames would help.

As for #2: I am not too knowledgeable in this area and I might just be naive, but I like to believe that computers will indefinitely continue to be made better.

Now, better use for the extra power... Sadly, you have a point there. I just wish SOME developers will try it.

Seriously though, if you think "anything beyond 60 FPS is already pretty much beyond what the average person can perceive", then you missed my stealth-edited point. You need to take a look over here: http://www.testufo.com/

This is your screen showing what is input as a crisp pixel-perfect UFO flying past your screen at a constant speed, at your setup's highest possible framerate. As you instinctively follow it with your eyes it just turns into a smudge. I am assuming that your monitor doesn't have any of that fancy black-frame-insertion or anything of that sort. All I'm saying is that it would look sooo much better with actual data in between. Think of it: if even at 3000 pixels/sec each tick would only be a single pixel difference or even less. That is what I want.

NeatNit wrote:Seriously though, if you think "anything beyond 60 FPS is already pretty much beyond what the average person can perceive", then you missed my stealth-edited point. You need to take a look over here: http://www.testufo.com/

This is your screen showing what is input as a crisp pixel-perfect UFO flying past your screen at a constant speed, at your setup's highest possible framerate. As you instinctively follow it with your eyes it just turns into a smudge. I am assuming that your monitor doesn't have any of that fancy black-frame-insertion or anything of that sort. All I'm saying is that it would look sooo much better with actual data in between. Think of it: if even at 3000 pixels/sec each tick would only be a single pixel difference or even less. That is what I want.

It may be what you want, I simply question your ability to actually perceive the difference. As I said, 60 FPS seems to be pretty close to the limit of human perception. Double it for good measure. Hell, increase it by an order of magnitude, and call it 600 FPS just to be sure. I doubt that there are many people (if any at all) that could tell the difference. Frankly, I can't tell the difference between 60 FPS and 120 FPS in your example.

NeatNit wrote:At some point in the distant future, games would be rendered and displayed at 5000 fps. It will be glorious.

See you there. *enters freezing chamber*

Edit: I'm bored, and feel like writing something up. Therefore, my view on things:1. There is a limit to how big a monitor you might want. This limit has been reached.2. There is a limit to how many pixels a monitor of that size can have before any increase becomes meaningless. Many professionals think 4K (QuadHD) is just that.3. Computers and processing power is gradually improving, always.4. So is graphics quality.5. Eventually, processing power would become so powerful that it would be no problem to create fully detailed images in full 4K resolution without any compromises.6. Besides framerate, what do we have left to improve in games with all that processing power?

Therefore this will happen.

Why is this awesome? Because of motion blur, or lack thereof. In real life, if you track a moving object with your eyes, it will appear sharp and the entire background will show motion blur to you. Do the same on a computer screen, and the moving object will appear blurry as well, even if no computed motion blur is applied. Now, in real life, if you're looking at something static (let's call it the background) and an object comes flying past, it will be blurry. In a game with no computed motion blur, it would flash in each position on its track with each frame. If you're paying enough attention, you can see details in it even though you shouldn't. If there is motion blur applied to the object, it would look right when you're not following it with your eyes, but when you are it would be even blurrier.

The best way to solve problems is to go crazy with the numbers. Why can't I find any info on a prototype screen/simulation with non-fake ultra-high frame rates?